Policymakers are being urged to rethink agricultural reform by focusing less on boosting crop yields alone and more on building institutions that connect farmers to markets, processing, and industrial value chains. A new African Business analysis argues that China’s agricultural transformation was driven not simply by productivity gains, but by coordinated systems that linked millions of smallholder farmers to storage, logistics, financing, and export demand. With Africa’s 33 million small farms producing roughly 70% of the continent’s food, experts say fragmented production and weak market access remain major barriers to long-term agricultural growth. The report highlights China’s township and village enterprise model as a potential blueprint for Africa to develop locally anchored cooperatives, agro-processing hubs, and farmer aggregation systems capable of strengthening rural economies and reducing post-harvest losses.
African Business
